Attending Love – A Reading Group
Reading Group as part of the Praxis-CFUL activities
Love and attention are concepts whose morphology is hard to grasp. They call into play considerations on epistemic virtues, emotions, and interpersonal interactions, and their appeal for philosophical investigations has to do, at least to some extent, with how pervasive they are in ordinary life. If attention has been, and still is, a pivotal notion for phenomenological accounts, love as an object of theoretical interest has somehow been neglected in the history of modern and contemporary philosophy. Inverting this trend, Iris Murdoch saw a connection between love and attention: attention is the attitude one must have in order to see reality as it is through a “just and loving gaze” (1997:327), where love is realising that something has an existence of itself, independent from us. In the economy of Murdoch’s thought, considerations of attention and love are tightly related to the idea that facts and values are not separable: our understanding is always moral understanding. Both love and attention thus figure as central aspects of moral perception and epistemic knowledge.
This reading group aims at exploring what the linkage between love and attention involves, bringing together contributions from authors that explore different facets of this relation. Topics that will lead our reading are: cognitivism/non-cognitivism in epistemology and moral philosophy; the relation between moral psychology and standpoint epistemology; and feminist perspectives on love and perception.
Where: Room B112.G of the FLUL (School of Arts and Humanities/University of Lisbon)
When: every two weeks on Wednesdays, from 5-7pm (see program below)
Working language: English
Organizer: Francesca Scapinello
For receiving materials and for further information, contact Francesca Scapinello at fs18@edu.ulisboa.pt.
Program
Session 1 | 22 October 2025
Murdoch, Iris. “Vision and Choice in Morality.” In Murdoch, I. (1997). Existentialists and Mystics. Writings on Philosophy and Literature. London: Penguin Books.
Session 2 | 5 November 2025
Lovibond, Sabina. “The Elusiveness of the Ethical.” In Lovibond, S. (2022). Essays on Ethics and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
and
Crary, Alice (2015). “Feminist Thought and Rational Authority: Getting Things in Perspective.” In Literary History, 46 (2), 287-308.
Session 3 | 19 November 2025
Ahmed, Sara. “Orientations Towards Objects.” In Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer Phenomenology. Orientations, Objects, Others. London: Duke University Press.
Session 4 | 3 December 2025
Cavell, Stanley. “Knowledge and Acknowledgment.” In Cavell, S. (1967) Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Session 5 | 17 December 2025
Dover, Daniela (2024). “Love’s curiosity.” In Proceedings of the Aristotelean Society, 124 (3), 323-347.
Session 6 | 14 January 2026
Yao, Vida (2020). “Grace and Alienation.” In Philosophers’ Imprint, 20 (16), 1-18.